he town making furniture and earn a man's wage," he said.

In a month he had passed his first examinations and was made a sizar.
Before this he had been fag to everybody, but now he was fag to the
Seniors only. He not only made their beds and cleaned their rooms, but
also worked their examples in mathematics, and thus commanded their
respect.

Once, being called upon in class to recite from Euclid, he declined and
shocked the professor by saying, "It is a trifling book--I have
mastered it and thrown it aside." And it was no idle boast--he knew the
book as the professor did not. When he arrived at Cambridge, he carried
in his box a copy of Sanderson's Logic presented to him by his
uncle--the uncle having no use for it. It happened to be one of the
textbooks in use at Trinity. When Isaac heard lectures on Sanderson he
found he knew the book a deal better than the tutor, a thing the tutor
shortly acknowledged before the class. This caused young Mr. Newton to
stand out as a prodigy. Usually students have to rap for admittance to
the higher classes, but now the teachers came and sought him out. One
professor told him he was about to take up Kepler's Optics with some
post-graduate students--would young Mr. Newton come in? Isaac begged to
be excused until he could examine the book. The volume was loaned to
him. He tore the vitals out of it and digested them. When the lectures
began, he declined to go because he had mastered the subject as far as
Kepler carried it.

Genius seems to consist in the ability to concentrate your rays and
focus them on one point. Isaac Newton could do it. "On a Winter day I
took a small glass and so centered the sun's rays that I burned a hole
in my coat," he wrote in his subsizar journal.

The youth possessed an imperturbable coolness: he talked little, but
when he spoke it was very frankly and honestly. From any other his words
would have had a presumptuous and boastful sound. As it was he was
respected and beloved. At Cambridge his face and features commended him:
he looked like another Cambridge man, one Milton--John Milton--only his
face was a little more stern in its expression than that of the author
of "Paradise Lost."

In two years' time Isaac Newton was a scholar of whom all Cambridge
knew. He had prepared able essays on the squaring of curved and crooked
lines, on errors in grinding lenses and the methods of rectifying them,
and in the extraction of roots where the cubes were imperfec